Digital Marionette

Concept: Corebounce Art Collective
Pascal Müller
Stefan Müller Arisona
Simon Schubinger-Banz
Matthias Specht
Date: 2006

Marionettes for the digital age: instead of a wooden cross and the strings attached to it, there’s speech recognition software and computer cables, and the hand-carved wooden figures have been replaced by the likes of Lara Croft.

The Mezzanine Level is where visitors input the speech commands that gets the digital marionette talking and operate the control elements that move its head and determine its facial expression. A screen enables the user to follow the marionette’s actions and simultaneously to observe the reactions of viewers in the Lobby below.

In addition to speech recognition, the installation utilizes everyone’s favorite input device: the mouse. The control elements are hooked up to moveable wires on the mousepad. The movements of the individual control wires are registered by eight mice. The overall artistic concept is interdisciplinary, combining historically accurate information from art history with architecture, interaction design and the latest results to emerge from the fields of computer graphics and speech recognition.